Bad Kid

by David Crabb

  “Want another?” Greg asked. He lit me a fresh one by holding it against the tip of the one he was already smoking; the two cigarettes crackled against each other as a mushroom cloud of smoke drifted upward.

  “That’s called monkey fucking,” he said, handing me the lit Marlboro.

  Onscreen, Catherine Deneuve was parting her lips to release a thin trail of smoke, which drifted over her top lip and into her nose.

  “I can do that. It’s called a French inhale!” Greg leaned into the TV’s dim light so I could see him re-create this ageless French vampire’s smoking trick. My head began to spin from the nicotine as I watched the smoke move over the soft stubble on Greg’s upper lip and into his flared nostril. The hairs on the back of my neck stood up as I shifted in my bed, worried about the flushed, warm feeling in my face and chest.

  “David, you try it.”

  I held the cigarette to my lips and executed the trick perfectly, staring directly into Greg’s eyes as he did the same. The two of us finished the entire pack of smokes, monkey fucking cigarette after cigarette like it was a contest. Lit only by faint moonlight and the cold glow of The Hunger, we could’ve smoked forever, like our lives depended on it.

  This is Greg doing two of the things that made me love him madly.

  1. Being hilarious. Note the catalog pose and fake mannequin hand in his perfectly shredded, acid-washed Guess jeans.

  2. Looking perfect: the mock turtleneck, expertly gelled hair, and gold necklace. Half our freshman class wore crucifixes as the Madonna-stained eighties continued to linger into the front end of nineties fashion. But no one at our school wore their faux expressions of religious faith quite as well as Greg did.

  CHAPTER 6

  Black Celebration

  Greg and I spent almost every waking moment together that summer. By then he’d ditched his girlfriend. During the day, we’d hang out in the neighborhood with Greg’s little group of great-smelling buddies, who were all easygoing and kind. There was Billy, a slightly overweight boy with freckles who was always making dumb faces and loved playing Pac-Man for hours at a time. There was also Phil, a skinny blond boy who lived on the next block and dated a different girl every week. And then there was Joe, a lanky basketball player with black hair and blue eyes who listened to heavy metal.

  I didn’t have to work too hard in their presence because they were all such loudmouth buffoons. I could sit in a room listening to them riff on Beavis and Butt-head for an hour and not say a thing. They weren’t just entertaining; they were also the first group of males I had felt comfortable around in a long time. But none of them made me feel quite like Greg did. As we got closer, it became harder for me to be away from him for more than twenty-four hours at a time.

  “You’re staying over at Greg’s again, honey?” asked my mom, rouging her cheeks in the bathroom mirror.

  “Um, yeah, if it’s okay?”

  “Of course it is!” she said, patting my cheek. “This is your summer!” My mom had been staying at Mike’s often, when she wasn’t working. The summer was giving her the chance to experience a bit of romance before I went back to school. It was also giving me the chance to form a new friendship. “It sounds like a great environment over there, honey.”

  Although it wasn’t a bad environment, Greg and I weren’t exactly eating balanced meals, trading baseball cards, and going to bed by ten. Our days with the boys were pretty traditional: video games, movie theaters, and MTV. But our evenings were different, and they belonged solely to us. Every night we’d stay up late smoking cigarettes and drinking gallons of coffee. We’d rewatch The Hunger and talk about witchcraft, flipping through my mom’s big purple Book of Spells, which lived under Greg’s bed now. We’d try to figure out how to sneak into over-eighteen clubs and get our hands on this elusive “marijuana.”

  “Greg’s a nice boy from a big, stable family with two parents at home,” added my mother as she brushed her hair. “They say that kind of familial bonding can be very good for adolescents from single-parent homes.”

  I rolled my eyes, imagining which Is-My-Child-a-Serial-Killer book my mother had gleaned this information from. “Yeah, you don’t want me out there torturing cats.”

  “Oh hush, you,” she yelped, smacking my arm with a hairbrush.

  Later that night, after a long day playing video games at Billy’s, Greg and I were prepping for our favorite activity: the Ouija board.

  Around 8 p.m. we snuck through his house, gathering every candle we could find. We lit each one, until the bedroom was glowing with flickering orange light. Greg delicately placed the Ouija board on the floor between us. Sitting Indian-style across from me, he closed his eyes and inhaled deeply.

  “Okay, David. Are you ready?”

  “I’m ready,” I responded, shutting my eyes and lowering my hands onto the little plastic pointer.

  Greg asked the spirits all kinds of questions: about our futures, our friends, how we’d die, who we’d been in past lives. He truly believed in the power of the Ouija board and would heed its advice, taking notes in a small journal he hid in the frame of his bed. I watched him write; he bit his lip adorably as he looked at the ceiling to organize his thoughts. Everything in me wanted to scream out, You are the coolest, most handsome person I’ve ever met and if you’d just kiss me one time I swear I’d leave you alone forever.

  “Greg, do you think that . . .”

  “Oh my God,” he interrupted, wide-eyed. “It’s Sunday night!”

  We turned on the TV just in time for MTV’s 120 Minutes, a weekly show featuring two hours of our favorite music videos from the newly coined “alternative” genre. That summer we discovered bands like the Cure, Depeche Mode, Bauhaus, and New Order, in music videos featuring dark forests, fog machines, and oodles of black. We listened to an endless rotation of moody British male singers moaning seductively about how sad they were, or sadly about how horny they were, as Greg writhed around his room, dancing. The longer we’d been friends, the more he’d taken to performing outright routines for me.

  “David! What do you think?” he asked, slowly swaying forward as he touched his right heel to his left toe on the floor. “Doesn’t this look cool?”

  “Yeah. It’s like you’re walking on an invisible line or something.”

  “Oh my God, David. You’re right. I should call this the Tightrope.”

  “Whatever, private dancer,” I said, rolling my eyes.

  In truth, I could’ve watched Greg dance for hours as he spun in circles and pointed skyward. I sang along and thumbtacked different cardboard CD sleeves like makeshift posters to the wall over my bed. And by that point I was really starting to think of it as my bed. In my room. In my house.

  Our nights together were a separate thing from our days with the boys, like a secret. Neither of us elaborated on this in words, but a part of me knew that Greg’s dance numbers were strictly for us, for me; and I loved it. Slowly, we saw less and less of Billy, Phil, and Joe. Even the days became our own, and by August we weren’t hanging out with them at all.

  One morning a few weeks before our sophomore year would start, Greg and I walked to the mall. We liked going just as the shops were opening, when elderly folks wearing ankle weights did their early-morning laps around the building’s perimeter. Greg and I went straight to the Music Express CD’s & Cassettes with our little list of songs we’d heard on 120 Minutes. After buying as many CDs as we could afford, we set up camp in the food court with our gray Discmans with the orange buttons, excited to listen to our new tunes.

  “What’s this one?” Greg asked, popping my Pet Shop Boys Introspective CD into his Discman. He flipped around the right ear pad of his huge Koss headphones so I could listen too as the opening track, “Left to My Own Devices,” began.

  We stopped chewing our Chick-fil-A nuggets and froze, immediately transported by the lush, ethereal sound of a full orchestra and dramatic synth hits. A clearly homosexual British man began singing about being “a lonely boy, no stre
ngth, no joy / in a world of my own at the back of the garden.”

  I wanted to scream, Greg, he’s singing about me!

  To be fair, we didn’t really have “gardens” in Texas. We had flat, dried-out yards full of burnt yellow grass and stray cat shit. But the music made me feel like I could be anywhere. As the synths and drums built, the vocalist began singing about Che Guevara and Debussy. I didn’t know who Che Guevara and Debussy were, but I wanted to. The album continued like a satellite course at Euro-Gay University as Neil Tennant sang about impressionist art, the Russian Revolution, and more British landmarks than you could shake a bag of crisps at.

  “They’re amazing,” gasped Greg, his lips covered in honey-mustard dipping sauce. I considered Greg’s love of Pet Shop Boys, Erasure, and Catherine Deneuve. I liked all those things, and I was gay. So, mathematically, shouldn’t Greg’s appreciation of them make him gay too?

  I reached over the table with a napkin to wipe his mouth, saying, “Greg, you’ve got . . .”

  “What are you doing?” he snapped, pushing my hand away.

  “Oh. Sorry . . . your mouth,” I said. “Sorry . . . Sorry . . . I . . .”

  “Fuck you, slut!” someone screamed as a flock of birds scattered along the atrium roof.

  We looked toward Long John Silver’s, where the girl’s scream came from. Clustered around a mountain of Taco Bell wrappers and tipped-over thirty-two-ounce cups was a group of kids wearing black clothes and heavy boots. They threw ice and flipped each other off with black-varnished fingers, cackling and yelling at each other with painted lips.

  “Who are they?” Greg whispered as a boy in black lipstick noticed us watching. I quickly looked up, pretending to admire the skylights of the mall ceiling, half a chicken nugget hanging from my mouth. These were surely the cult kids we’d heard about on the ten o’clock news, the ones who murdered stray cats on chalk-drawn pentagrams in the park. Or maybe they were vampires who’d realized that covering themselves in a quarter-inch of foundation would protect them from the sun—vampires who, after thousands of years toiling in darkness, had discovered the secret to existing in daylight and said, “Yes! Finally, we’ve done it! Now we can go to the MALL!”

  We watched them for an hour, slyly catching glances as we showed off our brand-new Cure, Bauhaus, and Church CDs.

  “Look at that girl in the center,” I murmured, noticing a girl in the eye of the goth storm, sitting perfectly still. She was small and Hispanic; her burgundy-tipped ebony hair swept up from the back of her neck and over the top of her head, forming a curtain of strands over her face. Through the chin-length strands we could occasionally see one of her black-framed eyes, peering intensely around her. She was the queen bee of the group, never getting up as drone goths brought her giant Mountain Dews and fresh packs of Camel filterless cigarettes.

  “David,” Greg whispered in the bustling food court, as if we were in class. “Look at her face . . . When she moves again. Wait a minute. Look right . . . right . . . right . . . NOW!”

  As she leaned over to speak to someone, her crusty bangs momentarily moved away from her face. What I saw looked so strange that I didn’t quite process what it was at first.

  “Greg, does she have a fake nose?”

  At one point it might have been flesh-colored, but now it looked ashy and grayish, which made it seem askew on her face.

  Two hours later, the goth crew started to gather their things to leave.

  “Greg, they’re coming this way,” I whispered, opening the CD booklet for my Love and Rockets album and holding it near my face to be seen. As they shuffled past, their crooked-nosed leader stopped to tie one of her twelve-hole Doc Marten boots a few feet from our table. Slowly she stood up, staring at me through her veil of fried black bangs.

  “Hey,” she said. Greg and I looked up at her. “That’s an excellent album,” she sighed, then stared at us in silence. After what felt like a muted eternity, a boy in a Depeche Mode t-shirt ahead of her yelled “Daphne!,” a name that seemed totally at odds with her witchy persona.

  “See ya,” she said, shooting us a good-bye sneer before shuffling away.

  “David!” Greg exclaimed, grabbing my arm. “She liked your CD!”

  “I know!” I shrieked back, my excitement amplified by Greg’s skin on mine.

  We didn’t have the guts to say anything to her. But soon we’d have to muster the courage. Because we’d just met a legend, a rare bird, a unicorn.

  CHAPTER 7

  Warm Leatherette

  Son, we need to talk,” he said.

  There was no reason for my dad to be waiting for me in the parking spot in front of my mom’s apartment building after school. He wasn’t even supposed to be back in town for another four days. My sophomore year had only started a couple weeks earlier; it hadn’t even yielded a report card yet. My mind raced as I wondered what I could be in trouble for. Had my mom found my folder of Antonio Sabàto Jr. clippings from Calvin Klein underwear ads? Had she shown my dad the fantasy writings about Greg, Marky Mark, and the rookie cop from T. J. Hooker in my journal? What about the VHS tape full of Mark-Paul Gosselaar’s shirtless scenes from Saved by the Bell?

  My dad stood up from the curb and peered at me over his sunglasses.

  “Well?” he asked.

  “What?” I said, trying to sound casual.

  “Whaddya think?” he asked, grinning from ear to ear and gesturing to the car parked beside him. “I got you some new wheels, DJ!”

  “Oh. Um . . .” I looked at the boxy, baby-blue sedan, the car of a low-paid nurse saving for retirement or of one of the old nuns who shopped for yarn at String City in the mall. “What is it?” I asked, trying to muster some excitement for his subpar gift. “An Escort?”

  “No, son, but it’s very similar. It’s a Mercury Lynx.”

  “What about the Bronco II or the old Karmann Ghia I liked?”

  “Well, I did some research, son.” My father rounded the car excitedly with a yellow legal pad. “See here?” he said, pulling a pen from his shirt pocket and pointing to his data. “Bronco IIs tip over like clockwork. And they don’t even make parts for the other one anymore.”

  As he rambled statistics, I inspected the car, imagining Greg’s ridicule once he saw it. I leaned inside to see the navy-blue interior and slightly cracked plastic dashboard.

  “It’s lightly used,” said my dad jovially, “but it gets great mileage and will last for years and years, maybe even into college.”

  The nightmare of driving this car for four years worsened once I looked between the seats. “You got me a standard?” I screeched. “A standard? Why would you do that?”

  “Now calm down, DJ.” My dad rambled through a prepared list of cost-benefit analyses and safety features intended to offset my darkest fear coming true: having to drive a stick shift. For two months we’d sat in grocery-store parking lots and open fields, bucking back and forth in my attempts to drive his stick-shift truck.

  “But I can’t drive this!” I pleaded, no longer concerned with seeming thankful. “Please!”

  “David, calm down.” My dad put his hands on his hips and tightened his jaw.

  “But I drive Mom’s automatic just fine,” I whined. “Why did you . . .”

  “This is your new car, dammit!” he screamed. “You can let it sit here and rot for all I care. But this is what I was charitable enough to buy for you!”

  We barely spoke to each other that night over dinner at Bill Miller Bar-B-Q. I chewed my brisket angrily in silence, too immature to realize how lucky I was to have a car at all, let alone a free one.

  I mustered a bitter “Thanks” when he dropped me off in front of my apartment an hour later. As he pulled away, my mother came outside with her boyfriend, Mike.

  “You got yourself a car, huh?” he said, noticing the keys in my hand. Mike was a tall, woolly man with a thick beard. He spoke in a laid-back drawl acquired from being born and raised in Seguin, Texas, a small town known for being home to
the biggest pecan in the world.

  “Oh, honey,” my mother sighed, looking at my powder-blue boat. “So this is it, huh?”

  “Yep,” I answered, clutching the keys in my hand so hard I almost drew blood.

  “Well, it could be worse, right?” Mike asked with a grin.

  “How?” I asked, half-sarcastic, half-hoping for a real answer.

  “It could be purple or orange!” my mom exclaimed. “This is actually your mother’s favorite color!” She smiled, not knowing she’d just made it so much worse.

  “Get in and see how it feels!” said Mike, opening the driver’s-side door.

  As my mom and I sat down in the front seats, she reminded me, “A lot of sixteen-year-olds don’t get a free car, honey. Look on the bright side.”

  I gripped the steering wheel and settled into the cushy seat. I started to feel better, reminding myself that I finally had my own set of wheels. This positive attitude ended after a moment, as my mother reached to where the tape player should have been.

  “Huh?” she queried. “It only has radio?”

  I could feel my blood begin to boil on either side of my face. My ears felt hot and my jaw clenched. I was a sixteen-year-old with a car that had no ability to play cassettes or CDs. What was the point of living?

  By the end of September, the stereo had proved to be the least of my worries. It was the stick shift that almost did me in.

  “We’re going to die!” screamed Greg as cars from three directions slammed on their brakes. At the I-410/Perrin Beitel Road intersection I’d gotten stuck while pulling away from a green light. Car horns honked as I turned the key again and again, attempting to start the pastel beast but stalling it every time.